Introducing Alvin Langdon Coburn's photographic views of London Hilaire Belloc writes of "the curious way in which London engulfs village after village, creeping round it as a flood of lava might creep round a temple or a walled enclosure. The villages which the expansion of London thus encloses are never at once destroyed. Some remain almost intact for generations, some for centuries...The old houses, their gardens, and sometimes their family traditons as well, remain almost untouched."